


Hound 3

by terriku



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: Gen, if you squint and look at this sideways you could read this as kogami/akane, it's really just kogami -, vaguely spans the time from the end of season 1 to the beginning of sinners of the system 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:21:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22092484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terriku/pseuds/terriku
Summary: Will you find a replacement for me?Kogami, adrift.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	Hound 3

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ashburns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashburns/gifts).



> I have _a lot_ of Kogami thoughts. Dedicated to my good friend who let me drag them kicking and screaming into Psycho-Pass.
> 
>  **03/27/20** Major updates to celebrate Psycho-Pass: First Inspector & also the PSYCHO-PASS 監視官 狡噛慎也 manga which is a gift. Did you know Kogami used to wear three-piece suits? Now you do.

Kogami had stumbled into being an inspector in the same way he had fallen into being an enforcer. All of a sudden, all at once. It was like one day, the idea had tumbled out of the sky and landed in front of him. Before that moment Kogami had never thought much about detectives or the CID or the Public Health Bureau, but at that moment, staring at it, he’d felt it was right: like it was a piece of a puzzle he hadn’t even known he was holding. He wouldn’t be here at all if he hadn’t met Gino all those years ago.

This would surprise Tsunemori, he thinks, if he told her that.

But he is in the hold of a ship headed somewhere far away and he is alone. Gino, and the professor, and Tsunemori are behind him now, far away in a land where his words could no longer reach, might never reach again.

Before he boarded the ship, he had driven across all of Japan. From the endless hyper-oats field of Hokuriku through Kansai and Chugoku. The supply trucks ran at a steady pace and each kept the same precise distance between them. Weaving through them, he had wondered if there was a single other human on the road. But, no, as far as he could tell the trucks were all automated. Kogami was alone. And he was running. He wasn’t afraid to admit this to himself. Running, as fast as the motorcycle could carry him, and further still. Up and down mountains, past lakes, and across bridges, until finally he’d arrived in Kyushu and the only thing in front of him was the open ocean.

He’d come this far, and still, not enough. Behind him was Tokyo, the MWPSB, the system, Gino, Tsunemori, his mother; the life he’d known. In front, the endless ocean, and beyond that were new lands, different lands. Places he’d never known and never thought he’d know. It takes him less than four hours in Kyushu proper to sell off the bike and pay for passage. He doesn’t need to stop and consider anything at all. He’s had one foot out the door the moment he’d caught Makishima’s scent and two feet in free-fall since he took the key from the old man. Everything after was a short road to somewhere outside Japan.

Tsunemori would understand that, he thinks even if he didn’t say anything at all.

People like him don’t get last words. There is no neat little bow of closure to wrap everything up. All he’s left them is an absence, a knife-wound, a cut that was quick and clean and all the more brutal. Kogami knows he does not get to say good-bye but still he thinks, if he could, he would tell her that this is normal for him. He’d fallen into being an inspector, and become an enforcer, and chased Makishima to the end of the line, and –

It’s always been like this with him. All of a sudden, all at once.

No room to breathe and no time for regrets.

*

In the world outside Japan, the years are the same but different.

Time moves differently. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster, sometimes not at all. In Japan, the days had a steady, stable rhythm. One, two, three. Like a metronome. Wake up, smoke, eat, smoke, work, smoke, fight, smoke, eat, smoke, study and smoke, sleep. It was predictable. Sometimes the cases ran together and he slept less and ate less, but the steady passing of time had never changed. There was day and there was night. There was on-duty and off-duty, which is to say, there was work and there was training. He hadn’t even known it could change, not until Makishima had been kneeling in the dirt and the setting sun was at his back. Kogami had been holding a gun, finger on the trigger, and the singular breath it took for him to pull it and kill Makishima felt as long and deep as the Mariana Trench. The decision had been made years and years ago when he’d still been an Inspector and the scent of Sasayama’s blood was still fresh in his mind. There was no hesitance at all, mental or physical. And yet, he remembers this moment like an eon, like the wide gulf between the man Kogami had been and the man Kogami had become. All the moments after came in a jumble he remembers alternatingly with clarity or not at all.

He remembers that he left immediately after that. That the bike and the Ruger SP101 were the only things he carried with him from Tokyo. He had nothing from Gino and nothing from Akane. Nothing, nothing at all. He rode the entire night straight down the road, away. Away. Night had stretched on and on as silent as a shroud. That was the first time he’d known how long the night could be. As with all things, this took a few years for him to recognize. Kogami, for all his instinct and understanding, had always come to know himself last.

Here, now, in some foreign country, Kogami could feel the steady, slow beat of his heart. He counted them like the ticking of a clock, and he waited. In-between beats he pressed down on the trigger and felt the recoil and knew without the confirmation, within the span of another heart-beat, that he’d hit his target.

He’s too far away to hear the man fall but his mind fills the silence for him. His heart rate never changes. It’s steady and stable, a predictable one, two, three just like a metronome. Killing is familiar enough to him to be mundane. In the years after leaving Japan, Kogami has learned to shoot anything vaguely resembling a gun, how to build and dismantle bombs, and the length of the night. It is sometimes long, and sometimes short. It varies, he is starting to realize, depending on what he remembers.

Under a foreign sun Kogami thinks only of tactics and fights and how to move his body and his men in the most efficient way. How to survive, and how to kill. Often these are linked in the world outside of the Sibyl System. There is less than a blink-of-an-eye between life and death. He has no time for reminiscing or navel-gazing. But sometimes at night, the familiar crawls into his skin and swirls in his blood; memory and smoke mixing together until they are undistinguishable. He is almost glad when the supply of Spinel runs dry – it is too _familiar_.

It comes back though in flashes. The scent of Spinel ghosting on his fingers, drifting through the haze of his memories, sticking to the back of his mind like an unearthed tomb. On those nights, he remembers something else of that night when he’d shot Makishima. He remembers the sight of Gino lying in a pool of his father’s blood. He remembers the weight of Akane in his arms, the whisper of bio-engineered oats against his clothing as he’d carried her somewhere safe, somewhere he could not see her so that she could not stop him on this last final hunt.

The sight of her held power. Tsunemori with her too-clear eyes and her sky-blue hue, who saw him too clearly and had offered him, against all odds, another path. And memory. Memory too. Kogami knew then as he knows now that he chose this path. It had been a choice; his choice. He chose to become the sort of man who drifts from conflict zone to conflict zone. The sort of man who can count his own heart beats and shoot between them. The sort of man who other men gather around and look to lead them into battle. Kogami feels the metronome-stable-beat of his own heart in the middle of a slaughtering field and knows that he chose this. This is not nature. He is not the bone-deep hunting dog by birth that Makishima had thought him. There had been another path. Tsunemori had clawed it out and held the gates open for him and, in her eyes Kogami had seen something from long ago.

A man he had been once, a boy, a fledgling-chick. A memory. A dream? Kogami does not dwell on the past and ruminate his choices. That has never been the person he is. Kogami ruminates on people, on men, on criminals and on battle. His thoughts dwell in the present; on action, on what ought to be done. If Makishima had not surfaced, if Akane had been allowed to matured with time and not experience under the old man’s wing, where would he be? Kogami does not know.

He only knows this: Tsunemori had pressed the Dominator back into his hands and offered him a different path.

And this: He had not taken it.

*

“Kogami-san,” she says in his dream sitting beside his bed, “you have never looked back.”

“That’s not true,” he says but she smiles and shakes her head. Kogami can’t raise his arm, it’s like he’s been paralyzed or shot with a tranq. If he digs deep enough, he’ll probably find the reason that Tsunemori always comes to him like this. Prim and proper with her feet flat on the hospital floor.

“You’ve never looked back. Not once, not for Ginoza-san, and not for your family, and not for me either.”

Kogami does not deny this, mostly because this Tsunemori is only a figment of his consciousness talking back to him from within a dream. In general, he found it pretty senseless to try to reason with dreams. But he knows that in a way she is right and this figment that takes the shape of Tsunemori is some sort of regret. If he digs hard enough, he’ll probably find the reason that guilt and regret come in her shape but - had Kogami ever stopped once and thought, if only for a moment, about anything outside of himself? When chasing Makishima past the bounds of the law, had he ever once thought of his mother condemned to live alone surrounded by the constant reminder of her criminal son?

Had he stopped even when Ginoza lay there with a mangled arm and a father’s corpse and stared back at him begging for something, anything; begging Kogami not to leave him alone? Had Kogami looked back then?

When Akane lay on the ground surrounded by broken oat chafe, with a blow to her head and a leg half skinned raw, breathing but only slightly – had he stopped then? Akane who had held the gun in her hand and handed him back the Dominator which he had thrown away; Akane who had given him a chance to be a detective again.

He does not need to answer for the answer is there in Tsunemori’s clear eyes.

“Kogami-san –”

“Kogami we’re almost there.”

Kogami wakes on the hard back-seat of an ancient land rover. The salt-sea smell of SEAun is gone and replaced by the overwhelming rich scent of rain forest. He can still taste the antiseptic in the back of his throat. Yeon is looking over the front seat back at him and smiles broadly when he sees that Kogami is awake.

“Kogami,” the boy says, “what do you want for breakfast?”

Later over kuy teav and nhoam, Yeon’s father Sangha lights Kogami’s cigarette – Dunhill, unfortunately – for him and asks where he’s headed next. Yeon had spent most of the car ride extolling the virtues of this commune to Kogami and begging shooting lessons and fighting lessons, but Sangha is an ex-revolutionary. He knows that Kogami will not stay here even though it is sunny and quiet and relatively peaceful.

There is no peace outside of Japan, though Kogami thinks that some of the crimes perpetrated under Sibyl’s watchful eye are far worse than anything that could happen outside of it. The violence that Sangha has known is so mundane in comparison to dismembered school-girls turned into sculptures or the gore a Dominator can generate. In this world outside of Japan, corpses swell with exposure and guns shoot bullets of metal. There is more death and more destruction, but it is simpler. More straight-forward. The men who fight at his side laud him for his instinct and his analysis. They say he is a savant, but Kogami hasn’t had to twist his mind in half and send it down a shadowed alley into the depravities of the human heart. He understands these people and he understands the rules of this world.

Here, there is rice when times are good. It tastes sweet to his unaccustomed mouth. And the meat is savory, and the chilis spicy. The lime that floats in his bowl is sour and the noodles have a texture that hyper-oats cannot replicate. Sangha takes his bowl and says that he knows someone heading north. Kogami snuffs out his cigarette and picks up his bag. He’s gone before Yeon returns from his afternoon soccer game.

*

The further he goes; the further Japan slips away from him. There are times when it feels like nothing more than a fever dream. Kogami lights a fire with flint and remembers once, he lived in a city where any food at all could be made from the same paste. What had it tasted like? He can’t recall. He remembers tailored suits and holo-suits, guns that spoke in your head, graphical interfaces on demand. Nowadays, the most his guns say to him is the hiss-click of a jam, or the clean hot ejection of brass casing.

In his dreams, he sees the endless sea of swaying gold. Japan’s breadbasket devoid of all life. In his waking life, he sees the women-folk bent between fields of greens. Some are rice which he has at least seen before, but more often than not the people of these lands grow some foreign grain. Sorghum? Barley, maybe, he thinks. It changes as he moves and yet the reality of agriculture is never far from the battlefields. This is the work that Japan has thrown off and dismissed as base and unnecessary. And yet, Kogami finds it satisfying. He finds it honest and simple. In the back of his mind a voice laughs at him for this passing pastoral fantasy _. You could never do this_ , it says, _you could never live this life._

And it is true. Kogami drifts through the mountains and valleys bearing guns and knives and bullet-proof vests. He lives a mercenary’s life carried through these fields on tides of violence. So long as there is conflict, he stays. But when the peace returns long enough for the families to till and seed and harvest their fields, he is gone. He could not live that life, not even in his dreams.

Mostly he travels alone. There are companions here and there, though truly they are just people traveling in the same direction. Travelers on the same road. He hasn’t joined a group of any sort since SEAun. Not since Akane stood there on the veranda of an ancient temple and smiled at him and told him he was and was not like Makishima. The Akane of the flesh he’d seen and held and touched for less than 24 hours blends so seamlessly with the Akane of his dreams. She sits there in a too-white hospital room or leans against the ancient ballast grown mossy with age. Her face is harshly lit by glaring white light or a guttering flame. And she smiles her slight smile and tells him truths he is too blind to see.

Makishima’s nothing more than a flash of light, the gleam of a razor-sharp blade under the bright sun but Kogami feels him lurking somewhere bone-deep. One day the village boys look at him and there’s a brightness in their eyes and the certain emulating way they stand that makes Kogami’s heart seize. He’s gone by the next morning packed into a crowded bus to some other city. It’s an 8-hour drive and wedged between an old grandma and a young mother with two children. He has nothing else to do but sleep.

In his dream, Akane sits in her chair. She tells him that he won’t become another Makishima. Kogami lies in the bed and stares at the ceiling of a hospital he hasn’t seen in at least four years. He isn’t so sure.

*

_Because you don’t want to control other people –_

To Akane, to Tsunemori who is an Inspector he would trust with his life, this is Makishima’s defining trait. This is the line that separates Kogami and Makishima. Kogami remembers her, knees splayed in a pool of her friend’s blood. Her fingers had been trembling then. And she’d stood up again ready to answer Makishima head-on.

But Tsunemori had not fought Makishima. She had not felt his breath on her neck, the grip of his hand on her wrist, on her hip, on the small of her back. Kogami can remember the weight of his fist, and the scent of his hair. Kogami remembers the rabid, infectious joy that Makishima had radiated with his every wild movement. The feral edge to his movements that screamed of having found an equal. Someone he could measure himself against. Kogami remembers Makishima’s eyes: the eyes of acknowledgement, of having found a kindred spirit.

The Makishima that Tsunemori had known is one that exists as transparency at the other end of a Dominator. He is the voice in her head, the slow steps down a metal staircase, the controlled razor against a still throat. And Tsunemori had not known Kogami when he was younger, brasher, more insistent. So full of righteous-belief, so confident in his own ideals. Bursting with youth and the words of Foucault and Nietzsche and Conrad. Willing to be a weapon. To move forward towards one’s goals no matter the cost. To enforce one’s beliefs through violence. To not have a place in the society that was your home.

Kogami understands all of this in a way Tsunemori never will because Tsunemori loves the law, and order, and stability. Her heart is full of these inhuman concepts and while there is room for revenge and hate, they are things she can give up for a greater-good.

When he catches his reflection in a mirror or the still surface of a puddle or the buffered metal of a car, sometimes what Kogami sees is not his own face. Sometimes it is the gleam of a knife’s edge, razor-sharp and cutting indiscriminately through anything at all. He can see the path there, clear as day. Makishima had too. What had he said that day at the border of night and sunset?

_\- after this, do you think you will be able to find a replacement for me?_

*

Half-way up the Tibetan foothills, Kogami shelters in a half-abandoned temple. There is a tidy pile of skulls showing the tell-tale sign of execution stacked in an alcove of the prayer hall. Though he has no incense he lights a cigarette and leaves it there to smoke as offering. The colored tapestries are frayed and the red paint is peeling off of the pillars. Nevertheless, moonlight and clean mountain air stream into the hall and it is dry and empty which makes it an upgrade over the past fifteen places he’s slept.

Two days after that he decides, suddenly and without any prompting at all, that he will stop killing. Makishima laughs, loud and clear. Sometimes Kogami hears him clearly, and other times he is nothing more than a mumble of incomprehensible syllables in the back of his head. Other people tend to drown the voice out, but here, in the quiet of the abandoned city, Kogami hears him loud and clear.

_A hunting dog that pulls out its own teeth – really, do you think this will change your nature?_

Kogami inhales. Exhales. He doesn’t talk to this specter on principal, but he does make parallel observations. It’s not a conversation per se, not least because he knows it’s all in his head. Objectively speaking, Makishima is wrong. He is not a dog. A hunting dog is guided by nature and nature alone. Was a knife to be hated for being sharp or a gun for being accurate? Even the Dominator, for all that they were guided by Sibyl’s voice and Sibyl’s analysis, for all that they were Sibyl’s weapons, had all had triggers. A gun is a choice. A knife is a choice. A Dominator is a choice. Kogami chose to become a hunting dog. He had liked it. Even now the rush of blood that fills him as bullets fly and the edge of a blade slices too close is the most exhilarating thing in his life. He feels the most alive on the battlefield where thought melts into pure instinct.

But it was a choice. It was not inevitable. He was not condemned to some violent fate by his birth. Kogami is not so naïve as to believe he can offer penance for his past actions. Penance is something that can only be given to him, and he remembers Tsunemori and how she had taken the gun in her hands. How her eyes said that she’d never held such a thing before, but how her hand had wrapped around the butt instinctively. He remembers that Tsunemori gave him the Dominator – and that when presented with a choice again, he’d answered with five empty shells falling to the pavement.

Had she purposefully sought to spend all the bullets? He’s tugged this thought back and forth over the years but over the past few months, and especially after seeing her in SeaUN, he settles on an emphatic ‘no’. Tsunemori knew him. She would have known that he was carrying reloads on him and that the only way to keep the gun from his hands was to keep it in her’s.

Makishima taps his fingers against the half-derelict bannister; the rhythm matches Kogami’s heartbeat. The ensconcing wall of the stair case had been blasted off leaving a vantage point and the twisted remains of a window-frame. He has a clear line-shot, if only because something had taken out chunks of the two buildings between him and the target.

He feeds the bullet into the chamber and pulls the bolt. He settles down and feels the weight of it on his shoulder, belly pressed flat to the concrete. Besides him, Makishima squats. He’s a white blur in his periphery. He sights the target and lines up his shot. Kogami does not repeat the man’s injustices to himself as he does this. He does not need to. There’s no need to fool himself into anything at all. The justice Kogami believes in is dead, but so long as he has the strength to choose, he will.

_Kogami-san-_

For half a second, he sees Tsunemori standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of NONA tower, silhouetted against a blue sky. The sunlight is spilling over her shoulders as she looks back at him.

His grip slides a few centimeters and the shot blows clear through the man’s shoulder. It’s a bloody mess of gore and splintered white bone. He’ll live. Though his sight, Kogami can see the medic reaching for the coagulation factor already. But he won’t fight again, at least not on the front lines.

Makishima laughs and stands and leaves.

Kogami follows.

*

That night, in the bed of a truck and under the stars, Kogami dreams. He dreams of a field of yellow oats, swaying in the wind, endless and stretching unto the horizons. Tsunemori’s standing there in the middle of the path that someone has cut through the field.

 _I wouldn’t choose differently_ , he tells her, _I could not have. Even knowing what I know now, I would not have been able to choose differently._

She says nothing. Kogami cannot stand still, not even in a dream. He takes a step forward, and then another, until his pace is too fast to be called walking and not yet fast enough to be called running. He can feel the whisper of chaff against his legs and is surprised when Tsunemori does not block his way. Kogami does not even have to push past her. He passes close enough that their shoulders brush and still, she says nothing. She does not step into his path and she does not grab him and beg him to stop. But then, Tsunemori had never been a wall that he must breach. She had only ever been a rope dangled in front of him, an open gate leading to another way.

He passes her, and then, he stops. They are almost back to back, on a parallel so they cannot touch and cannot see each other. Kogami does not speak, but there is a question there nevertheless.

Tsunemori gives no answers. The Tsunemori that follows him and speaks to him in dreams is only a dream after all, but Kogami knows what her answer would be. He pushes on, onwards, ever forwards.


End file.
